Walter Day

Walter Aldro Day Jr. ( born May 14, 1949 in Fairfield, Iowa) is an American entrepreneur and founder of Twin Galaxies, a pioneer of e-sports.

Life

Day worked in the oil industry. In November 1981, he opened an amusement arcade in Ottumwa called Twin Galaxies. Shortly after a cover story was published about video games in TIME magazine in 1982, which dealt with the 15- year-old Steve Juraszek, who had set a new record in the game Defender, one of the players that record broke clear in his game room. Day subsequently contacted both Williams Electronics Games and Namco and learned that neither of the two companies themselves led a leaderboard. He was thus inspired to introduce an international leaderboard for video games, with the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard what he into reality on 9 February 1982. In November of this year, Life magazine published a cover story about Twin Galaxies.

He founded the U.S. National Video Game Team, the first professional video game team, which was composed of five leading players of the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard, and was the team manager. The team toured in the summer of 1983 by the United States, the events were partially broadcast on American television and some of the results reached in the Guinness Book of Records. In 1983 honored by the Governor of Iowa in the presence of high-level representatives of Atari Day and Twin Galaxies. As a result, Day worked as an assistant editor for the video game area for the Guinness Book of World Records between 1984 and 1986.

Besides the pure collection of the data under Days line soon rules were created that ensure comparability of results and should prevent fraud or exploiting bugs. In this case, the rule book Twin Galaxies ' Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records (ISBN 1887472-25-8 ) was born.

2007 Day was in two documentaries about the history of the video game, Chasing Ghosts: A Fistful of Quarters to see: Beyond the Arcade and The King of Kong. At the latter he was involved as a screenwriter. In March 2010, Day announced his retirement from Twin Galaxies announced that he wanted to take up a career as a singer-songwriter.